Academic Adventures

It’s been a little while since I last posted an entry, but I’ve been busy keeping up with my schedule of classes and homework. In addition to my four graded courses, I am also participating in a three week conservation workshop. Over the course of the three, two hour sessions, our class will learn how to piece together and reconstruct a broken ceramic jar. Each student was asked to bring a ceramic vase or pot and a bag of rice to the first session. Since I really liked the jar I brought, it was slightly painful to watch the instructor place it in a bag and smash it on the ground! During the first session, our instructor taught us how to slowly determine which pieces of our pots belong where and how to move in a clock-wise rotation when gluing them back together.  While wating for certain parts to dry, we stabilized our jars by placing them in a small basin of rice. I am proud to say that I did a decent job piecing together my jar and I am now looking forward to phase two of the reconstruction process: applying plaster. In order to simulate a real archaeological find, our instructor told us to leave out a piece of our jar (as if it couldn’t be found). During our next session, we will apply plaster to this void and later paint it as if we were preparing a museum quality object for display. I forgot to take a "before" picture but I will definitely upload a shot of the finished project!

In addition to my conservation class, another cool academic experience from this past week was a second trip to the National Archaeological Museum. In my Aegean Prehistory class, we are currently studying bronze age Minoan and Cycladic cultures. Therefore, we took a trip to the museum to see in person the cycladic figurines and pottery we’ve been studying in class. Below are a few pictures of some objects our professor talked about during our visit. I feel so lucky to be able to see in person the artefacts I am learning and reading so much about!

Since I feel like my time here is flying by, I thought I’d end with a poignant quote from Seneca’s Troades (the play I am reading in my Latin class):

Quidquid sol oriens, quidquid et occidens

novit, caeruleis Oceanus fretis

quidquid bis veniens et fugiens lavat,

aetas Pegaseo corripiet gradu. (382-385)

("Whatever the rising sun,

whatever the setting sun discerns,

whatever the Ocean washes

coming and going twice with its

blue gulfs, time will snatch up with Pegasean pace.")

-Sam